Officially, the 10 homelands were dismantled under the interim constitution that introduced democracy in 1994, paving the way for the reversal of the dispossession that had been entrenched by the 1913 and 1936 land acts. Instead, 20 years later, a series of laws, bills and policies proposes a separate legal regime for people within the boundaries of those former Bantustans. A version of ‘customary law’ that defaults to the tribal boundaries and ascribed identities of the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 is used to justify continued segregation and unequal citizenship. The effect is to consolidate the unilateral authority of chiefs in relation to land ownership and to deny other rural South Africans the right to decide for themselves how to use and share the newly discovered mineral wealth of the land they have owned and occupied for centuries.
